Jackpot Blood: A Nick Herald Genealogical Mystery by Jimmy Fox

Author:Jimmy Fox [Fox, Jimmy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 18

Saturday morning, Nick’s bruised right shoulder and sprained, possibly fractured, elbow hurt worse than they had the afternoon before, when an emergency-room doctor prodded and poked him and finally decided that he would live. His right arm was encased in a padded nylon tube affair, resting in a sling. The doctor had determined there was no concussion, but it was a close call. Holly occasionally cast glances of empathetic pain his way.

“If we have to move,” Irton Dusong was saying, “we’ll sure enough do it. I’d just as soon give up this place and be on our own reservation. We don’t even have a sprinkler system.”

“We sure could use a new facility,” Grace Dusong confirmed, “and a bigger operating budget. We could advertise. No one knows where we’re at. Hardly ever more than a dozen visitors on a weekend.”

The Katogoula Museum was a Spanish-style stucco building just within the boundaries of Tchekalaya State Forest. Nick, Holly, and the husband-and-wife caretakers stood in the brick courtyard.

Irton had apparently forgotten to comb his silver hair or shave for several days. Once a tall man, he now leaned forward at an unnatural angle, the result of an accident years before at Tadbull Mill. Grace, his wife, was a round woman with the stiff joints and gnarled hands of advanced rheumatoid arthritis. A cheery yellow floral bandeau secured her long charcoal-streaked ashen hair. They’d gained unwanted notoriety, and the animosity of certain other tribe members, by favoring at the last moment a tribal casino.

“I’m always patching something or other together, as ’tis,” Irton said, drawing out a screwdriver and pliers from his overalls chest pocket. “Maybe we’ll set us up some of them video poker machines in the new museum. That ought to help out the budget some!” He burst into laughter.

Nick, as he listened to the couple discussing the pros and cons of moving, unobtrusively probed the tender, throbbing bumps distributed randomly around his head.

A deputy had found him, half-conscious, at the bottom of the courthouse stairwell. The culprit had escaped, and Sheriff Higbee had no suspects. Nothing had been taken from Nick’s briefcase—a fact that didn’t surprise him: he was carrying easily replaceable copies of genealogical documents. Had his mysterious assailant, fearing future connections Nick might discover, tried to erase what was in his head, forever? Was this attack on him connected to Carl Shawe’s death, another warning, perhaps, intended to persuade the tribe to change directions? Or was the motive to hurt or kill him rooted in his own experience?

He felt lucky to be alive. More than once in the last eighteen hours he’d been tempted to throw in the towel and hightail it back to New Orleans, where at least the rampant street violence was nothing personal.

Grace Dusong was explaining that the small yearly allowance from the legislature was one of the few benefits of state tribal recognition. The museum dated from the 1950s, the end result of a controversy involving Katogoula relics that had been dug up during highway construction in the thirties.

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